Fletch Won

by Gregory Mcdonald

  Barbara, bugs on her, was no longer scratching. She said, “That’s sick.”

  “Pretty sharp,” Fletch said.

  In the red of the setting sun, she shuddered. “Punk.”

  Fletch ran his fingernail along her calf. “But do you get the point?”

  “A little lacking in metaphor,” she said.

  “But consider the irony.”

  “Weird!” She moved the book in Fletch’s hand to see the cover. “What’s that supposed to be?”

  “It’s a poem by Tom Farliegh called The Knife, The Blood.”

  “That’s poetry? Not exactly ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…’ ”

  “I guess it’s called the Poetry of Violence. Tom Farliegh is its inventor, or chief current practitioner, or something.”

  “Where did you get it, a motorcyclists’ convention?”

  “Tom Farliegh may or may not be Donald Habeck’s son-in-law.”

  “For a son-in-law I’d rather Attila the Hun.”

  Fletch rolled onto his stomach. “It is sentimental, of course.”

  “I prefer Browning.”

  “At least he gives flesh and a knife their values.”

  “Oh, yeah. He does that. And why, Irwin, are you carrying around a book of poetry by Habeck’s son-in-law the night that Habeck is murdered?”

  Even facing away from the sun, Fletch squinted. “Don’t you find it interesting?”

  “Fascinating!” she said falsely. “Is the whole book like that?”

  “I’ll read you another.” He reached for it in the sand.

  “Not before supper, thank you.” She stood up. “Flies and satanic poems. Did you bring anything for supper?”

  “Yeah,” Fletch answered. “There are some pretzels in the car.”

  “Great. I could tell you stopped somewhere on your way home. You arrived in nothing but swimming trunks.”

  “I know how to prepare pretzels.”

  “Come on. I brought lamb chops. I’ll show you how to prepare them.”

  “I’m going to jump in the ocean.” Fletch began to get up slowly. “Wash the sand off.”

  “You can tell me all about your new assignment,” Barbara said, beach bag under her arm like a football. “The one that has nothing to do with people getting bullets in the head.”

  “Yeah, I’ll do that,” Fletch said absently.

  in truth,

  were they not just

  made for each other?.

  “So what’s your assignment?” At the stove, Barbara wore an apron over her swimsuit.

  Fletch munched a pretzel. “Research on Ben Franklyn.”

  Dark outside, light inside the beach house, the huge plate-glass windows reflected them.

  “Somehow Ben Franklin doesn’t strike me as news.”

  Fletch found the brown paper bag in which Barbara had brought the chops, potatoes, peas, and milk. In it, he put Donald Habeck’s suit, shirt, tie, drawers, socks, and shoes. “Got some string?”

  “Look in that drawer.” She pointed with the potato masher. “What’s new about Ben Franklin?”

  “Healthy sort of man. Very contemporary.” Fletch tied the string around the package. “Inventive. Diplomatic. Always liked the ladies. A businessman, too. He was a good businessman, wasn’t he?”

  “How burned do you like your chops?”

  “If you’re asking, stop cooking.” He tossed the package on the floor near the front door.

  Sitting at the table, Barbara said, “I’m calling your mother.”

  “What did I do now?”

  “You’re getting married Saturday. Don’t you think Jessica ought to hear from me, her daughter-in-law-to-be?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Give her the opportunity to come to the wedding, you know? Make her feel really welcome.”

  “I wrote her. Don’t know if she can afford to come. She’s a poor writer, you know. I should say, she’s a writer, and she’s poor. And if we pay her way from Seattle, we won’t be able to afford a honeymoon.”

  “Still, her son’s getting married.”

  “Naked?” Fletch asked. “Do you still mean for us to get married naked?”

  “No.” Barbara scooped mashed potato into her mouth. “I haven’t been able to get rid of that eight pounds.”

  “Ah,” smiled Fletch. “So you do have something to hide.”

  “I’ll ask you once more about your father.”

  “What about him?”

  She asked, “What about him?”

  “He died in childbirth.” Fletch shrugged. “That’s what mother always said.”

  “Modern American marriage.” Barbara sighed and looked at their reflection in the window.

  “Yeah,” Fletch said, “what’s it for?”

  “What do you mean, ‘What’s it for?’?”

  “Alston asked me at lunch if I was sure I want to get married. That was just after I asked him to be my best man.”

  “Alston works for Habeck’s law firm, doesn’t he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is he happy there?”

  “Not very.”

  “What did you answer?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Lawyers are always asking difficult questions. That’s their job. Makes ’em feel superior, I think. Helps them create the illusion they’re worth their fees.”

  “Frank Jaffe said something or other about the only point in getting married is if you intend to have children.”

  “He’s right. Almost.”

  “Do we intend to have children?”

  “Sure.” Barbara’s eyes glanced over the rough wooden floor of the beach house. “We have to have money, first. You’re not earning much. In fact, you’re not in a very high-paid profession. I’m not in a profession at all. Kids cost a lot.”

  “Someone mentioned that today, too.”

  “What did you do, go around today developing a brief against marriage?”

  “I went around today announcing the joyful news you and I are getting married Saturday, and everybody asked, Why?” Barbara stared at Fletch. “In fact, I’d say for the most part, people’s reaction was, Bleh!”

  “That’s not very nice of people.”

  “No. It isn’t.”

  “Just because other people make bum marriages…”

  “What criterion do we have, but other people’s marriages?”

  “I think our getting married makes sense.”

  “So do I.”

  “We can support each other.”

  “Right. Today I tried to help you get out of Cecilia’s jodhpurs.”

  “Build toward a family, a way of life.”

  “As long as I keep accepting one miserable assignment at the newspaper after another.”

  “Companionship. Grow old together, seeing things from somewhat the same perspective, having the same memories, protecting each other.”

  “Correct,” said Fletch. “You know anybody who’s doing it?”

  “Doesn’t mean we can’t.”

  “No. It doesn’t.”

  “I definitely think we should get married,” Barbara said.

  “I do, too,” Fletch agreed. “Definitely.”

  “Just think of marriage the way you think of everything else,” Barbara said. “Playing through to truth. Only in marriage, you’re playing through to a truth of you, and me, and us.”

  The telephone rang.

  Startled, Barbara looked at it. “Who could that be?”

  “I asked Alston to call. He may have some things to tell me about Donald Habeck.”

  “Habeck.” Barbara carried her plate to the sink. “You’re crazy.”

  “Yeah.” Fletch stood up to answer the phone. “Factor that in, too.”

  “Hate to admit it, ol’ buddy,” Alston said. “But you just might be right”

  “Of course I am.” Fletch settled into a Morris chair by the phone. “About what?”

  “As best I could, without my fingers getti
ng caught in the files, I’ve been able to dig up a few things for you: Habeck’s latest big case; his current big case; and—this is where you may be right—what old client of his just got out of the pen with, maybe, an irrepressible urge to send a bullet through Habeek’s skull.”

  “There is one?”

  “First, his last and current big cases. Doubtlessly you have comprehensive newspaper files on both.”

  “Yes. I got them this afternoon.”

  “So you know the current big case concerns the chairman of the State House Ways and Means Committee being charged with a kickback scheme. Bribery.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s charged specifically with having accepted fifty-three thousand, five hundred dollars from an architectural firm contracted to design a new wing on the State Penitentiary at Wilton.”

  “Hope the state senator had them design a nice cell with a southern view for himself.”

  “Doubt he’ll ever see it, if he did. The maneuvers here are too sophisticated for me to understand. I don’t mean legal maneuvers, I mean political maneuvers. Habeck has filed all kinds of motions and petitions I don’t understand. He’s doing the most amazing fox-trot through the courts with this case. I don’t understand why the courts put up with this kind of wriggling.”

  “Habeck was just trying to let the case get to be old news as far as the public is concerned, wasn’t he? After a while the public, and the courts, too, I suppose, lose their anger over a case like this. We become tired of reading about it. Indifferent to what happens. Right?”

  “Right. It would help if you journalistic types blew the whistle on this kind of maneuvering once in a while. Reported in depth the history of such a case. Demand that the courts make final disposition of it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So you’d be interested in Habeck’s personal notations on the records of this case?”

  “You bet.”

  “The first notation says, Get this before Judge Carroll Swank.”

  “Ah. The idea being that Judge Swank owes something from the deep, dark, shadowy past to Senator Schoenbaum.”

  “One assumes so. Some indebtedness safely hidden. You boys would never be able to find it.”

  “Or, Senator Schoenbaum holds something in the blackmail line over the aforesaid Judge Swank.”

  “Judges may deliberate like self-righteous prigs, but they must live as pragmatists.”

  “I’ll write that down.”

  “A second note on the file in Habeck’s own writing might also interest you. It reads, Actual kickbacks Schoenbaum admits to over eight hundred thousand dollars. Tax-free, note. Plan fee in five-hundred-thousand-dollar range. Both these notes are near the beginning of the file. The rest of the file is just a record of Habeck’s jerking the courts around.”

  “Until he gets the case in front of Judge Swank.”

  “And that’s when he really jerks the court around.”

  “Meanwhile, Senator Schoenbaum is vacationing in Hawaii.”

  “Yes. Poor jerk thinks he’s going to come out of this a rich and free man.”

  “Well, he’s half right.”

  “I don’t see Schoenbaum as anybody who wants to ventilate Habeck’s head.”

  “No.”

  “The other cases Habeck is pleading, and there are more than twenty, are all being worked up by underlings, poor beavers like me. Several cases of embezzlement, two vehicular homicides, a half-dozen cases of insurance fraud, as many as ten cases of parental kidnappings—you know, when a member of a divorced couple loses the custody battle and arranges to have his own kid kidnapped?”

  “That many?”

  “It’s a big business. If I ever decide to leave Habeck, Harrison and Haller, I might decide to go into it. I’d feel more useful.”

  “Gives one pause to think.”

  “Plus one rather funny case about a milkman.”

  “I met a witty milkman once.”

  “This one is real witty. Listen. First, he rented a sable coat for his wife, for a month, on credit.”

  “Loving husband.”

  “Then he walked his sable-adorned wife into a Rolls-Royce showroom, and leased a Rolls-Royce for a month, on credit.”

  “Liked good cars, too.”

  “With his wife in the sable coat, both of them in the Rolls-Royce, he was able to rent a small mansion in Palm Springs.”

  “Why shouldn’t a milkman live well?”

  “With the coat, the Rolls, and the house, he then went, to a local bank, and wangled a five-hundred-thousand-dollar cash loan.”

  “Wow.”

  “And gave up his job as a milkman.”

  “Yeah. Why should he need to work with all he’s got?”

  “He returned the coat, the car, and canceled the lease on the house. And skipped to Nebraska.”

  “You can buy a lot of cows in Nebraska for five hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Even the bank didn’t care, for three years, because the guy kept paying them interest out of the principal he had borrowed.”

  “Don’t tell me. He was charged with Understanding America Too Well.”

  “Eventually, the well ran dry, of course, and the bank went after the retired milkman.”

  “Why would Habeck take on a case like that? I don’t see how the milkman can pay him much.”

  “Okay. Habeck took on the milkman’s case. As soon as the bank heard that, they began to shake in their collective boots. Habeck, Harrison and Haller bought a few shares in the bank, and then threatened the bank with full exposure. Charged loan-forcing, incompetent administration, and a loan policy so inept that clearly the bank’s charter should be revoked. After all, Fletch, they made a half-a-million-dollar loan to a milkman!”

  “Oh, boy. So the bank is going to swallow the five-hundred-thousand-dollar loss, or whatever part of it the milkman didn’t pay back out of principal?”

  “Not only that, two of the partners in the bank, who also happen to be bank officers, are buying back the few shares of stock Habeck, Harrison and Haller own at what you may describe as well above market value.”

  “Phew. What I’m learning about the law. Tell me, Alston, is that called ‘settling out of court’?”

  “I think it’s called having a bank by the short hairs, and tugging.”

  “I think it’s called blackmail. Of course, I never went to law school.”

  “At law school, it’s called blackmail.”

  “So far today, I’ve learned Habeck, Harrison and Haller, as a law firm, is actively in the burglary business, the blackmail business, judge fixing… what else do you guys do for a living?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “You sure all law firms aren’t this way?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “What happened to the milkman?”

  “He moved to New York State, where he’s employed as—”

  “A milkman!”

  “No. As some kind of a psychotherapist. During his three years in Nebraska, he qualified for some kind of a degree, got a professional certification which permits him to earn a living being understanding.”

  “I’ll bet he’s good at it.”

  “I’ll bet he is.”

  “Upward mobility, Alston.”

  “The American dream.”

  “Through judicious use of credit.”

  “The name of the game.”

  “The creation of another debt-free professional.”

  “Warms my heart.”

  “The legal system works, Alston.”

  “Don’t you ever forget it.”

  “And a bank had to sharpen its loan policy, from which we all benefit.”

  “Habeck’s last case that reached the newspapers was about a year ago.”

  “The case of the Fallen Doctor.”

  “Yeah, the doctor who organized a certain number of his patients into drug pushers. The doctor was a wreck himself.”

  “And Habeck got him off by charging the Narcotics
Bureau with entrapment.”

  “Ultimately, yes. First he went through a lot of dazzling footwork regarding the sanctity of the patient-slash-doctor relationship. To wit, doctors are not to be entrapped by the confidences of patients who turn out to be narcs.”

  “And, tell me, Alston, how did Habeck, Harrison and Haller get paid for that job?”

  “There was a million dollars of cocaine never found by the authorities.”

  “Good God. Burglary, blackmail, drug pushing… why doesn’t someone bring charges against Habeck, Harrison and Haller?”

  “Who’d dare? In fact, talking to you right now, I feel my pants slipping down around my ankles.”

  “I appreciate that, Alston.”

  “Where you may be right is that a Habeck client got out of jail last Tuesday. And he’s not a very nice person. He served eleven years the hard way. And I don’t understand why Habeck took on the case in the first place.”

  “No personal notes?”

  “All the files, except for a microfilm record of the case, are in the warehouse in Nevada and I can’t get to them.”

  “He must have had a reason.”

  “A child molester. A real sweetheart. He had two trained German shepherds. Apparently he’d enter a housing project, first attract little kids with his dogs. Then the trained dogs would herd and hold the little kids in a corner of the building, or the play yard, and this son of a bitch would then make free with them.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Say one for me. Takes all types, uh?”

  “Jesus!”

  “Lots of little kids gave evidence. There were lots of witnesses to the event with which he was finally charged. I guess he had been getting away with it for a long time. He counted on the dogs to help him make his escape. What he didn’t count on were a couple of black brothers who weren’t intimidated by German shepherds and kicked their heads in.”

  “And he got only eleven years?”

  “Habeck must have done something for him.”

  “Eleven years!”

  “I’m sure they were eleven hard years, Fletch. Child molesters are not popular in prison. They get very few invitations to the cellblock cocktail parties.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Felix Gabais. Employed at various jobs, bus driver, school-bus driver, taxi driver. Lived with a crippled sister in the Saint Ignatius area. Would be about forty-one, forty-two years old now.”